NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB Review - Page 1

Introduction

A little less than five months ago NVIDIA launched their latest high end graphics chip, G70. Given the competitive environment at the time, thanks to ATI's R520 misstep, NVIDIA had the luxury of being able to build up stock prior to release and to set, what would now appear to be, reasonably conservative clockspeeds on their flagship GeForce 7800 GTX product, based on the G70 chip.

In time for the holiday season, and just as the competitive environment is changing with ATI finally releasing parts of their new X1000 series, NVIDIA is giving their line a little refresh. With the mainstay of their 90nm based line-up yet to come, this pre-Christmas refresh is based on currently available parts moving into new price brackets, but while the lower end gets cheaper the high end gets more expensive - but also gains some fairly significant increases.

Here we're taking a look at NVIDIA's new GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB board to see how it has moved on from the previous GTX 256MB configuration.

The Graphics Chip

The new GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB board is based on the same G70 chip as the rest of the 7800 series, however NVIDIA are stating that due to some process changes they can now yield the part at higher clockspeeds for this new product. The details of the chip are as follows:

Its interesting to note that the chip is marked as "7800-U-A2" giving an indication to this being a chip speed binned as an "Ultra" part, although NVIDIA ultimately shied away from the name due to the availability stigma attached to it.

As the specifications shows, the configuration of this chip is the same as previous parts on the G70 line, and as such the features it enables are the same as well. A quick recap of these capabilities follows: